Glide Effortless to be the first “browser as OS”
Ok – browser as OS is a term that has been thrown about and speculated on. The concept is to provide a set of applications through ANY web browser such that it’s suitable for doing the majority of your work. Most people speculate on Google being the company to bring this all together, but today I found an article that talks about just that, from a company called Transmedia. The site is Glide Effortless.
It looks as though they provide a means to save and share all sorts of documents (images/videos/contacts/emails/etc.etc/) From what I can tell, there is a download to do this, much seems to be done through a web interface though.
From their site…
We want Glide Effortless to give you the best experience possible, regardless of your browser or Operating System.
The Apple® Mac OSX™ version of Glide Effortless is scheduled to be available on Christmas Day December 25, 2005.
The Linux version of Glide Effortless will be available in early 2006.
In the meantime, you can still experience Glide Effortless when Windows™ users interact with you. In fact, once your experience begins, you will be able to access Glide from any PC or Mac™-based computer with full functionality regardless of whether you use Windows™, OS X™, or Linux.
So it sounds like an application deals with putting files/etc. on the Glide servers, after which a web browser alone is needed to access them. (Windows users only currently can upload content, but anyone can download if they’re allowed by the user that uploaded.) At least that’s the way I read it. Anyway, that was the blurb on the page I got when I visited “sign up” in konqueror (it looks like it thinks I’m using Mac OSX by the page title.)